The crass behaviour of Britain’s financial aristocracy rivals the last of the Bourbons. Marie Antoinette famously patronised the Parisian mob with her ‘let them eat cake’, while dining in luxury in the Tuileries.

The City bankers who ruined their banks but have been kept in employment by the taxpayer now demand we pay them their bonuses to maintain the aristocratic lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. They know no shame and take no blame. They are lucky the British have no guillotines in stock.

"At least 50 people are on hunger strike, with 20 on the critical list, according to Binyam. The JTF [the Joint Task Force running Guantánamo] are not commenting because they do not want the public to know what is going on.

The Vatican is in damage control mode in a continuing row over a Bishop who recently espoused beliefs that the Nazis did not use gas chambers to murder Jews, and that far fewer than 6 million were slaughtered during the Holocaust.

"Since I see that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must look again at the historical evidence," he told Der Spiegel, according to the Jerusalem Post. "It is about historical evidence, not about emotions. And if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time."

TVNL Comment: The term "denial" is used as a weapon against anyone who questions the account of the Holocaust. There are serious questions as to the details of the historical account. There is valid suspicion that the details of the losses and horrors suffered by Jews was exaggerated to in order to invoke sympathy and support for the creation of a Jewish state. Most people accused of denying the Holocaust are not doing so, they are simply questioning the details and extent of what happened.

Court papers filed in Houston on Friday show Kellogg, Brown & Root LLC is preparing to plead guilty to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for promising and paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes to officials in Nigeria in exchange for engineering and construction contracts between 1995 and 2004.

The government filed a criminal information in federal court, a document which is often used as part of a plea deal.

KBR, a major engineering and construction services company with operations around the world, was split off as a separate public company from Halliburton in 2007.

In order to prevent any details of its torture record being publicly disseminated, the Bush administration threatened the British government with withdrawal of intelligence sharing if they allowed a court to publish the redacted evidence. Foreign secretary David Miliband denied this on Wednesday, but the letters from the US have been released by Channel 4 News. And their message is unmistakable. The first letter:

What has happened is that Google has digitally "crawled" my inbox, noted that I was writing about beds, and sent me a targeted advert. To some this is very scary. Google knows what I am writing about all the time. In theory, it knows that I have just been to the doctor for a check-up.

The frozen remains of two mice infected with the bubonic plague are missing from a New Jersey bioterror research facility, and the facility waited seven weeks to report the incident to federal and state authorities.

Officials with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, where the remains went missing, and FBI officials, said the missing mice pose no public health threat.

This is the same facility where three live plague-inflected mice went missing in September 2005. Officials concluded those mice died.

TVNL Comment: Remember this if "al Qaeda" conduct a bio attack on us. Remember the source.

According to US government propaganda, terrorist cells are spread throughout America, making it necessary for the government to spy on all Americans and violate most other constitutional protections. Among President Bush’s last words as he left office was the warning that America would soon be struck again by Muslim terrorists.

If America were infected with terrorists, we would not need the government to tell us. We would know it from events. As there are no events, the US government substitutes warnings in order to keep alive the fear that causes the public to accept pointless wars, the infringement of civil liberty, national ID cards, and inconveniences and harassments when they fly.